News

As many of you will know, Ishani and I were offered positions at Rutgers a while ago. And after a somewhat long negotiating period, we’ve decided to accept them. So we’ll be starting at Rutgers in January 2008.

Part of the reason this was a long negotiation was that Cornell is a pretty good place to work too (to say the least). If you’re reading this blog you probably know how good the faculty are, and the students are really superb. (As many of you will find out as they storm the job market over the next few years.) So I wasn’t exactly feeling a need to leave.

But still, we’re excited about moving to Rutgers. It’s a department that is strong, both at faculty and grad student level, in so many different areas. Having philosophy of language colleagues like Jeff King, Ernie Lepore and Jason Stanley will be a blast. And Rutgers is still the place to be for epistemology. And I’m looking forward to being reunited with former colleagues like Ernie Sosa and Dean Zimmerman. And the NYC/NJ area is home to an insane percentage of the philosophers I’ve learned the most from, and am continuing to learn from. So I’ve both got a lot to look forward to.

I could write a long post on the horse race aspects of this move. (Scarlet Knights trade Arntzenius and Sider for King, Lin, Maitra and Weatherson; Big Red trades Irwin and … you get the idea.) But as fun as that would be, perhaps it is best left for another day.

Ishani and I have each been in upstate NY for five years, so leaving is a big deal. There’s a lot to like about the area, both philosophically and geographically. I think the departments in this area have some very underrated philosophers, many of whom I’ve gotten to know well over the five years here. So as excited as we are about the new jobs, we’ll miss a lot of people here as well.

11 Replies to “News”

Congratulations, Brian, on what must have been a very difficult decision. Clayton is right — it’s wonderful news for Rutgers. We’ll be very glad to have you.

(Incidentally, I’m impressed that you seem to be the one to break your own news — you posted over four hours ago, and the news has yet to make either the Leiter Report or the Rutgers department listserv!)

I should have made it clear that I wasn’t in any way complaining about the “horrible news” for my alma mater Cornell. After all, my own current team (the Dark Blues) have been responsible for at least as much bad news for Cornell in recent years as you have …